At least nominally opposed to fame, the Unknown Theater (1110 N. Seward Street on Theater Row) has, in the short time since its 2005 founding, mapped out an ambitious corner of the boards in which to make a name for itself.  There’s a refreshing energy of purpose to this group and an admirable attention to detail – from the stunning website to the what’s-your-hurry warmth of its bar lounge to the Pullman-car comfort of its seats.

Play selection, on the other hand, is not so cushy.  It soon becomes clear that Unknowns are seeking notoriety for forgotten scripts they think still resonate. This has evolved into aesthetic incorporating past and present, theater and jazz, and the call to perform unheard of work like Kenneth Patchen’s Don’t Look Now, which due to critical support (and a set that will be heart-breaking to strike) is now in a January 4-21 extension after its November-December run.

Patchen (1911-1972), a gifted  poet, was a synthesist.  His blending of poetry and jazz helped set the stage for the beat movement, making him a logical object for Unknown illumination. But it is his identity as both anarchist and pacifist that gives Don’t Look Now its edge.  The play, one of two published in Lost Plays of Kenneth Patchen, is a whirling  warning for an America adamantly assuming its primacy in a good-evil paradigm now blurred by a nuclear age we ushered in. 

A five-member family -– father (Morry Schorr), mother (Angela Paul Stern), daughter (Diana Wyenn), son-in-law (Kyle Ingleman), “aunt” (Carol Herman) -– along with two guests representing past and present culture (a vaudevillian-magician played by Carl Moebus and a ‘50s artist-type played by Craig Johnson) have been visiting together in the parents’ penthouse when their world is turned upside-down by outside events.  A form of erasure begins, and the tightening encroachment of dead space threatens to mute them entirely. 

Why this is occurring is not clear, nor is it the point. Patchen’s message is that our greatest danger is mindless acquiescence.  Shards of free verse fly from one character past another to land in broken mosaic.  These create shifting snapshots of the world a half-century ago, but in many ways still apply today.

However, Covics has encouraged or allowed his company to populate the deck with unfathomable characterizations of people who stay cartoonish through often shrill, manic projectile-speech. Even with abstracted exchanges of free-jazz inspired dialogue, hysteria should rise out of character, rather than the character be revealed through hysteria. When an actor does get his hands around a scene, as Johnson does in recalling one poignant memory, we feel the kind of detail a poet of Patchen’s precision had in mind for the piece.